Fragments: Walks on the Grey Side
by Wallace
Summary: When the world is shattered, it takes a strong man to pick up the pieces.
1. Part One: It begins

Fragments: Walks on the Grey Side

Author: Wallace (wal_lace@hotmail.com)

Summary: When the world is shattered, it takes a strong man to pick up the pieces.

Primary Characters: Wesley, Faith, Dawn, Lilah, Ethan.

Disclaimer: I don't own any of the characters or concepts contained herein, and do not intend profiting by their use.

Part One: It Begins.

She's tried opiates a couple of times, but after Orpheus they never had much of an affect on her. The amount it takes to get past her immune system, it wasn't worth buying. Coke is for people with incomes, and lives. Hashish and marijuana are about as effective as normal cigarettes. She takes pills when she can get them, painkillers and tranquillisers for preference, but most days, Faith just drinks.

  
London's a wonderful city. An off-licence on every corner, it sometimes seems like, and the pubs are full of assholes who are happy to get a girl drunk if they think they've got a chance. Lately there've been less of those, though. Faith has gained a look to her. She's drinking herself to death, and it shows.

  
If she had the energy she'd blame Buffy, of course, the way she used to blame the blonde bitch for everything. But, these days, she really can't be bothered to deny it anymore. It's all her fault, really. She brought herself to this, with a little help from her mother. Who, after all, taught Faith everything she knows about escaping from reality.

  
Her days are simple. Her first Watcher always used to lecture her on the importance of establishing a routine, and that, at least, seems to have stuck. She wakes up whenever, and if she has anything left to drink, she drinks it. If she doesn't, or if it's not enough, she goes out. She beats people up for money - she never gets much, in this part of the city, but she doesn't need much. Then she buys alcohol. Then she drinks it until the world goes away again.

  
She's got a nest. Four floors up, the loft of a condemned house with collapsed staircases and no floorboards. It's awkward getting up there, especially carrying bottles. A month ago she fell and broke her arm and shoulder in three places. More importantly, she broke three bottles of cheap vodka. The arm took less than a week to heal. The vodka was a serious loss.

  
  
He will always know her. After all they've been through together, after all they've done to one another, Wesley would know Faith if he was blind. But the smell nearly convinces him that he's mistaken. He's travelled through sewers, hunted through tenements, battled demons in drug lairs. So he's smelled far worse than this. He just can't make the connection between this stench - a foul mixture of alcohol, and urine, and blood - and the bright, fearsome beauty who taught him more about pain in a few short hours than he had learned in his entire life before her. He's learned a little more since, of course.

  
She's too drunk to resist as he picks her up from her nest of filthy blankets atop a sheet of corrugated iron. He's astonished at how light she is.

'She's skin and bones.' He mutters in surprise. It's a pointless exclamation, demanding no response, but his companion doesn't let that restrain him.

'I'm sure you'll be happy to give her something to eat.' Crooked lips curl in the beginnings of a smirk.

  
  
Ethan flinches away from the younger man's glare. He's as powerful a Warlock as any living, while the other man is a tired, beaten, failed Watcher, cast out by his friends, forgotten by his family, passed over by life. Although Ethan must be nearly twenty years older, Wesley's hair is greyer, his face far more lined and haggard. But despite all this there is an edge to him. Ethan's seen nothing like it, not even from Ripper in the glory days of their youth. It tells him that this man knows no way to fight other than to the death. And, for all his power, Ethan knows that right now, he's living only on sufferance.

  
'Let's go.' Is all Wesley says, and they do.


	2. Part Two: In which Dawn fails to grow up

Part Two: In which Dawn fails to grow up.

Dawn never told Buffy she was leaving.

  
This was deliberate. When Dawn walked out, she took absolutely nothing with her from the apartment they had been sharing. She left the clothes Buffy had seen her wearing that morning in a crumpled heap on the floor, underwear inside jeans on top of shoes. She dropped her jewellery on the pile. She dropped a bowl of cereal on the floor just beside it, standing well clear so as not to get in the way of the splashing milk. It wouldn't fool a forensic investigation, she knew, but Buffy would never think to ask for one.

  
Dawn wore the clothes Faith had brought, picked out by the older girl - black and pink and a Hello Kitty T-shirt that drew a withering look from Dawn, and a slightly guilty grin from Faith. And then she followed the older girl out, shutting the door firmly behind her, and waited while Wesley performed the petty spell that would turn the key on the inside of the lock. And then the three of them walked down to the car, where Lilah was waiting for them, wearing a trenchcoat and fedora like a character from a gangster Film Noir and smirking like a triumphant succubus.

  
They told her afterwards that the only reason they approached her first was because they thought she was the most likely to take independent action.

  
It wasn't just the four of them, of course; Wesley and Lilah had put together quite the team. A handful of former Watchers, a couple of skilled enchanters, the various professionals who helped to train Faith. And Ethan, Ethan who supplied the magic, and much of the knowledge, and almost all of the… subtext.

  
Dawn liked being part of their little group. She was useful. She was appreciated. They worked her hard, translating texts, studying demons, collecting information. She'd never thought of herself as good with computers but, she discovered, that was mostly a result of comparison to Willow; compared to most of Wesley's team, she was a technological genius. Even so, she had to be careful; Ethan assured her that Willow would not be able to trace her magically, but he could do nothing about technology. Dawn never even checked her old E-mail account.

  
Buffy had always tried to keep her away from the action. Within a week of changing sides, Dawn had witnessed her first takedown.

  
They'd flown to Berlin, following reports of a sixteen-year-old skinhead girl who had killed two policeman with her bare hands during a Neo-Nazi demonstration. And Dawn had been encouraged by Wesley to help Ethan with his tracking spell, and had gone with Faith to find the girl, and had watched as Slayer fought Slayer and age, experience, and the brutal training regime imposed by Wesley won over youth and vitriol.

  
She helped load the battered, drugged, unconscious girl into the ambulance Wesley had somehow acquired, and didn't think at the time to ask what they were going to do with her. Later, when she questioned Wesley, he muttered something about 're-education', and started teaching her a new parry.

  
Dawn learned hand-to-hand combat, and basic sorcery, and ancient languages. She spent her time travelling from place to place, occasionally resting in their home base in Edinburgh, and she drew a salary for hunting rogue Slayers, the monsters that Buffy had created.

  
She never thought that Wesley might be using her.


End file.
